On the morning of Oct. 7, Hamas soldiers breached the Gaza border fence at multiple points and killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel. They had been planning this for years. They had even rehearsed it. And the vast Israeli intelligence network missed it, not because the data wasn’t there, but because decades of […]
Tag: national security
Nauru’s Citizenship for Sale: Golden Visas and the Price of Survival
Imagine lazing on a beach on an island in the South Pacific — the temperature is always 80 degrees, the water always perfect, a mimosa in one hand and a pair of sunglasses in the other. Life has never been better on the paradise of the Nauruan shores. This isn’t real. What won’t be noticeable […]
Twenty Years After 9/11, FBI Surveillance Still Haunts Muslim-American Life
“Can you be spied on because of where you worship?” Hussam Ayoush is the executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. His organization is backing an intense Supreme Court religious discrimination lawsuit against the FBI for invasive surveillance of Muslim communities in Southern California that occured between the years […]
Damage Control: Continuous Resolutions and Continuous Setbacks for National Security
By Alexander Casendino “It is nevertheless remarkable that the world’s pre-eminent power so frequently fails to pay for its government on time.” -The Economist If any one political event could capture the corrosive state of contemporary United States politics, it is the shutdown. In just the first two months of 2018, the U.S. government has […]
GOP Going Green: The Power of Economics and National Security on Republican Support for Renewables
By Alexander Casendino On Feb. 26th, 2015, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, a climate change skeptic, decided to put an end to the global warming debate once and for all using a peculiar prop to convey his message on the Senate floor: a snowball. According to Inhofe, it was simply too cold outside for man-made […]
Europe: At the Crossroads of Crisis
This article is the second of a three part series aiming to demistify the Syrian refugee crisis. Part one can be found here. As the largest democratic nation in close proximity to Syria, Turkey has been at the forefront of the international refugee crisis. Over the past five years, Turkey has accepted over 2.5 million […]
Suspicious Surveillance
Part 2 of a series on U.S. cybersecurity. Part 1. Part 3. Part 4. In June of last year, now-infamous National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began leaking classified documents to the media. Since then, the steady stream of revelatory documents has generated a firestorm of criticism against NSA practices. The NSA, which is at […]